Guest Editor's Note
On the night I began to read the poems for the Korean American Women Poets folio, I learned that hundreds of poems had been submitted. It was spring, and I was terrified and grateful for the difficulty that lay before me. Even a decade ago, I couldn't have dreamed of being among a great number of Korean American women poets. I'd paid with heavy loans for an education in creative writing, where I entered room after room as the sole poet of Asian descent. In my mid-twenties, I met a Korean American woman poet in person for the first time—an experience that stunned me and changed my writing. I let go of the delusion I'd maintained over the years to not feel the loneliness which suddenly broke free. I said: "It's nice to meet you." These words translated into: "I've been so alone." The illusion of separation between myself and other poets was replaced by the acceptance through recognition rather than scarcity or peculiarity. How American literature rewards uniqueness among writers of Asian descent, rewards separation and scarcity through selection for consumption. This paralyzes Asian writers emotionally and mentally and within our own social circles. New and notable Asian writers depend on and are pitted against established Asian writers in our academic institutions and in literature. We're not changing the culture enough to deserve Asian writers. Still, I underestimated the number of submissions. With each page, my eyes blurred, the screen jolted. These were tears of confusion at my own disbelief, and my job was to notice it.
I had to deliberately understand my own limitations as an editor. I wished to reject a folio for consumption, for fear of it being used as an anthropological subject of education. Even among the most conscientious, the approach to what is Asian American amid American capitalism encourages a reading that shifts from poetics and poetry into ethnographic material—a dangerous way into a poem, assuming that wide interest in Korean American women's poetry comes from the desire to consume it. It is especially dangerous when reading with the mind to answer these questions: What makes this poetry Korean American? How can I remark on these poems? Are there enough elements for me to understand them as literary? At times, sitting at my desk, it seemed impossible to evade these potential engagements, and with that came bouts of anger and indolence. However, to say openly that these engagements exist also allows them to remain present with our reading—to choose to take them on, linger, or leave us. I believe these poems owe nothing to the world, and still they are expanding literary culture and surmounting difficulties with silence and existence—this, too, was a power soon to be revealed.
The truth is I did nothing; the poems have such power, on their own, to inherit and then refuse these perceptions. Each poem strikes me as singular, as imperatively subjective, apart from labels of any traditional identifiers of Korean American women's poetry. At the same time, they present the negotiation between the long history of Korean women's poetry from 2333 B.C. through the modern #MeToo movement in South Korea and the transpacific crossing of contemporary Korean American women's poetry in the largest Korean diaspora in the world. We are witnesses of each other across socio-historical [End Page 59] identities and anti-neocolonialist poetics. Korean American women poets are often scholars of Korean women poets, who have only recently been recognized for their contribution to Korean literature. Traditionally, Korean women are expected to adhere to gender roles, but they have shared in establishing the country's literature through writing, publishing, and activism. The women of the Korean diaspora, faced with boundaries of language, history, geography, as well as racism and xenophobia, have used poetry and translation on their own terms. Such terms have been necessitated by a self-awareness that neither South Korea nor America—nor in the complicated relationship of the written and oral history between these nations including issues regarding Korean adoption and Korean LGBTQIA+ rights—have envisioned women of the Korean diaspora to be as dynamic, critical, and wide-ranging. But women of the Korean diaspora have indeed been vitally active across multilingual world literature, schools and institutions, advocacy around the globe, and the re-framing of Korean popular culture, Hallyu, with the rise of Korean television, music, and film. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's seminal Dictee, published in 1982, is a work of memoir, poetry, translation, essay, photography, collages riffing on video and performance, praised for its diversity in genre, language, and culture—but to read Dictee is to feel it stay with you long after closing the book, after the research and poring over, after the speaking of its languages, after the going to bed, and lying there in darkness, after the everyday repetition, and the regular imposition of trauma, there is underneath the surface a way of being that was made possible for Korean American women writers and artists in this country.
Stine An's "Bomb of My Hometown Sings the Balm of My Hometown" is an experimental translation of the Korean children's song "고향의 봄" (Gohyangui Bom)—a translation in dialogue with Don Mee Choi's iconic Hardly War. There is the chime of the sing-along's grotesque and the flowers holding our memories: "bleeding with flowers/with lucky peach flowers, fuzzy flesh flowers, real baby azaleas." Mia Kang's "Theresa, I Miss You (Plan for Algiers) comes from a text and performance dedicated to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, a reckoning that Korean American women writers and artists have longed for: "I tried to retrieve you from my own shape." Who wouldn't be astonished by Sun Yung Shin's "Find a Naturalization Test Word," a crossword puzzle of reading vocabulary for the naturalization test? Looking at the grid, each letter, colonized by our eyes; every word a neocolony. Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello asserts a language for historical wounding in "Mythology": "[first of the motherless/twice mothered by war]." Emily Jungmin Yoon's "Field" steers you andante through the Field Museum—and the death of the speaker's grandmother. "Her grave is contracted for 50 years, another thing I learned then—/ where our bodies lie are temporary exhibits." The folio is in no way complete but one that heralds the arrival of many others in various forms and conversations. There are the poets I wished to include, and without whom this moment would not have be the same, but it is with gratitude that I say this folio will not be the last of its kind. We have further to go, imperceptible challenges ahead, but we will be ready.
Today, in the 21st century, a time when Korean American women in literature are being celebrated by a global audience, is a triumph. These poems carry a dignity gained by finding new language for the dispossession and exhibition of Korean women's bodies across political, economic, and social objectives. Out of these works come invention, new poetics, re-translation, and for me, a necessary imagining of a future never experienced before, one with the presence of being for Korean women everywhere. I urge the reader to turn with delight toward these poems through a manifold of valences that belie a simple interpretation or a neat vessel to hold its foremost and urgent contributions to American literature. [End Page 60]
